Arrogance blinded the West to the potential benefits of mask-wearing. Only now are Western countries adopting the strategy that Eastern countries embraced from the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak. We should be very wary of the underlying racism that led the West to resist face-masks, and be humble and democratic in assessing evidence.

It feels like I have lived through the Covid-19 outbreak twice, first in Hong Kong during the Lunar New Year in January, and now in San Francisco. Across the world, most countries are adopting similar preventative strategies, including hand-washing, physical distancing and quarantine. But there is one medical technique that has divided the world East from West: mask-wearing.

The opposing attitudes to mask-wearing expose not only different public health and cultural responses to this pandemic, but more potently it reveals an intersecting current of epistemic arrogance and racism that may further plague our global population if uncorrected.

The reaction of my family in Asia to the fact I am not wearing masks demonstrates just how different Eastern and Western attitudes are on this issue. Even though I am a non-clinical faculty member in medical and public health schools, with constant access to updated recommendations of infection prevention, my family continue to offer to send me masks. I have tried to reassure them by describing my meticulous hand hygiene regimen. But their anxiety continues even after I recite the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommendations.